Songwright

This post is about vocal harmony. If you’re thinking about adding chords to your melody, check out this post: Basics – How to Harmonise a Melody using Primary Chords

We’re always looking for new ways to spice up our songwriting. Corey Stewart has twelve of them this week.

But I’ve just got the one: Vocal harmony.

We often think of chords in vertical blocks, a bar of C, a bar of A minor and so on. Another way of thinking about chords is to imagine several linear melodies, of different pitches, weaving together to create the chords.

That’s how vertical harmonies work.

Ropes around the Sun

I’m using my song Ropes Around the Sun, which I completed for this year’s FAWM.

The song actually began life as an example for a couple of posts on melody I wrote months ago on songwright, one on starting a melody, the other on structuring a melody.

The aim today is to demonstrate a couple of the simplest and most common harmonising ideas.

1. As simple as possible

Here are the first two lines of the song.
Download Example 1

The melody follows an A minor scale down from C = C C B A A G F E / C C B A G F A….., and is harmonised with an Aminor and F Maj 7 chord.

An E note would sound good all the time, so the simplest harmony might be to sing an E note, like this:

Download Example 2

2. A third up

Another possibility, and one your hear a lot, is to sing the notes a third up in the scale.

What does that mean?

It means, if you’ve got a melody that goes C C B A, you take each of those as the first and go up to the third, giving you E E D C. It sounds like this:

Download Example 3

3. A third down

You can also do the same trick, going down instead of up:

Download Example 4

4. A mixture

Or you can do both at the same time:
Download Example 5

In Summary

These are only the basics, and admittedly none of the examples are perfectly sung. However, that should give you the idea if you’ve never arranged harmony before.

Have fun.

If you enjoyed the post, why not take a look at this post? It’s about the ebook I’ve just started writing called ‘How to Harmonise‘.